Looking for Manga Supplies?

Hey guys, its me Shaz! Sorry I've been keeping myself locked up in my tower all this while. I can assure you The Mannequin Waltz is well under way and you WILL be seeing new stuff real SOON. But for now I wanna touch on a subject some people have been asking about for a while now.

So there's been a lot of peoples asking around where other peoples outside Japan can buy their own manga supplies like the pen nibs, ink, screen tones and paper and so on. I've compiled 3 of the BEST sites that sell authentic manga supplies. I graded them based on how established the company was, price, customer service and efficiency of delivery.

They are from the top:

DELETER MANGA SHOP:  --> deleter-mangashop.com/ <--
Pros:
-Authentic Japanese Manga Supplier since 1984
-Using EMS postal service, items can be personally delivered to your doorstep within 4-5 days.
-Very good and fast response from their customer service (from personal experience)
-Since its directly from the brand supplier, items are cheaper compared to other sites
Cons:
-They only sell deleter related supplies (Its not really a bad thing considering their catalogue of manga supplies, unless you're dead-set in looking for a certain brand)

JET PENS: --> www.jetpens.com/Comic-Manga-Pe… <--
Pros:
-Large brand variety of nibs, as well as fountain pens and ink for manga
-Best place if you're looking around for a brand of nib or ink that could well be your future lifetime partner.
Cons:
-Spoilt for choice
-Only have nibs, fountain pens and ink but no manga paper, no screen tones
-Some of the items you can buy at deleter at a much cheaper price (about 25% cheaper)

AKADOT: --> www.akadot.com/manga-supplies-… <--
Pros:
-More US-friendly (they provide FREE bloody SHIPPING for you guys)
-Have their own variety of manga supplies that both deleter and jet pens do not sell.
Cons:
-For those buying outside of US must pay for shipping.
-Some items you can buy at deleter at a slightly cheaper price, (although if you're from US if you add up and compare, its still cheaper since there's FREE bloody SHIPPING)

~/For manga coloring supplies, majority of mangakas use alcohol based markers that go together with their thick manuscript papers and alcohol-proof inks.
Popular and mostly used brand is definitely by Too. Too is the company that produces COPIC markers. Frankly you can find COPIC markers anywhere around US. For other countries I'm not so sure, but a good place to start hunting is ebay and amazon. You can sometimes find markers at bargain prices, but beware and DO NOT BID else you will regret. Waste of money I tell ya. Another popular brand would be Prismacolor, though COPIC is still the dominant brand in traditional manga coloring./~

There's plenty other website that sell 'manga supplies' but I won't mention any of those types. I strongly believe with these 3 sites alone you can kick start your journey as a mangaka.

At Dickblick.com there's a lot of western comic paper sizes you can choose which are great for inking, in a more larger variety, but the problem is, as an independent artist, where the hell are you going to find a scanner to scan such huge paper. (From personal experience hunting online and through local tech stores, the biggest scanner you can get at an affordable price is an a3-sized flatbed scanner. Any bigger than that and the price range will be in the 4 digits.)

Amazon.jp have more variety of manga supplies but most of them sellers don't ship outside of Japan, and you need to type in hiragana/katakana or kanji in the search box to accurately find what you're looking for. There are sellers that sell internationally but they pop out once in a while, so its not advisable to get manga supplies there.

There's also ebay and amazon.com, but since they are only hosting individual sellers to sell, I can't really give a fair rating or recommendation.


Hope this helps you guys.